Singapore succumbs to massive data breach in 'state-sponsored' attack

Health details of a quarter of the population stolen by cybercriminals

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Singapore has been hit by a major cyber attack that saw a database containing the personal information of about 1.5 million people, more than a quarter of the population, stolen.

The attack was first detected on July 4th and came weeks after SingHealth, the entity managing the state's health service, declared that it was going to cut off staff access to cloud storage (such as Dropbox, and OneDrive) on July 1st.

It is unknown whether the two are related but the reason given back in May 2018 was that these platforms were increasingly being used by cyber criminals to store malware.

Who was behind the attack?

The systematic siphoning of the SingHealth database went undetected for nearly three years and Singapore's government has confirmed that the records haven't been tampered with but only copied.

The attackers, an official press release highlights, "specifically and repeatedly targeted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s personal particulars and information on his outpatient dispensed medicines" adding, "It was not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs".

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